Free Speech by Timothy Garton Ash Ten Principles for a Connected World

If a belief mandates the execution of apostates such as Hirsi Ali, you respect neither belief nor believer. But this is a small complaint. Timothy Garton Ash has produced an urgent and encyclopedic work...
-Guardian

Never in human history was there such a chance for freedom of expression. If we have Internet access, any one of us can publish almost anything we like and potentially reach an audience of millions. Never was there a time when the evils of unlimited speech flowed so easily across frontiers: violent intimidation, gross violations of privacy, tidal waves of abuse. A pastor burns a Koran in Florida and UN officials die in Afghanistan.

Drawing on a lifetime of writing about dictatorships and dissidents, Timothy Garton Ash argues that in this connected world that he calls cosmopolis, the way to combine freedom and diversity is to have more but also better free speech. Across all cultural divides we must strive to agree on how we disagree. He draws on a thirteen-language global online project—freespeechdebate.com—conducted out of Oxford University and devoted to doing just that. With vivid examples, from his personal experience of China's Orwellian censorship apparatus to the controversy around Charlie Hebdo to a very English court case involving food writer Nigella Lawson, he proposes a framework for civilized conflict in a world where we are all becoming neighbors.

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is the author of seven previous books of political writing and the "history of the present," which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last quarter century. They include "The Polish Revolution," "The Uses of Adversity," "The Magic Lantern," "The File, "and" History of the Present." He is currently director of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in "The New York Review of Books" and he writes a column in the "Guardian" that is syndicated across Europe and the Americas.

Financial Times

Reviewed by John Lloyd
on
Jun 03 2016

A writer who has fused the scholar’s profession with the journalist’s trade, he undergirds polymathic arguments for principled freedom with globe-trotting reportage from a decade of thinking about how societies can live in robustly (a favoured word) structured amity.

The Economist

on
May 21 2016

Mr Garton Ash argues forcefully that despite, or perhaps because of, these trends there is an increasing need for freer speech, and that “unnoticed by many of us, a great power struggle over the shape, terms and limits of global freedom of expression is raging around us, inside that box in your pocket and perhaps even inside our heads.”

Guardian

Reviewed by Faramerz Dabhoiwala
on
Jun 22 2016

As he repeatedly underlines, he is trying to start a discussion, rather than to present the final word. But he also argues, persuasively, that the way forward towards “more and better free speech” must rely less on law and formal restrictions, except in cases of clear harm, and much more on mobilising the republic of norms.

Guardian

Reviewed by Nick Cohen
on
May 30 2016

If a belief mandates the execution of apostates such as Hirsi Ali, you respect neither belief nor believer. But this is a small complaint. Timothy Garton Ash has produced an urgent and encyclopedic work...